I've thought it would be an interesting idea to talk about the increasing importance of ICT at school. So I asked my friend and a Primary School teacher, Marc Torres, to tell us why it is necessary to introduce ICT. 

I hope you enjoy it a lot.

The use of ICT in English Lessons

The 21^st century has supposed a big change in our way of understanding the society. The ICT industry has developed lots of changes in our life like the mobile phones, tablets, computers or digital television.

All these changes cannot be separated from school. I conceived the education as the way of introducing children in the society. Because of this, we cannot introduce children in the society of the 21^st century using methodologies of the last century.

More over, the Information and Communication Technologies have good points to help the education to be more attractive to children.

Motivation is a psychological factor that makes children to be interested in the contents of the school. This factor can be intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on the interests of children. Thank to the ICT children will be more motivated to work, just because they are doing different things at school as well as they are working with technologies that they manage outside the school.

Motivation is even more important if we talk about the learning process of a new language. When children do not understand what they are doing they need an extrinsic motivation, and as I have said the ICT can assume this challenge.

Education has to bet for the ICT and it is important to train teachers to use these technologies in an education context.

In this way, there exist a lot of applications that can be used in an English lesson, some of them are free and some of them need to be paid. So it is not an excuse not to use them because they are expensive.

I have investigated some of these applications and I propose some of them in the way I consider them very useful in English lessons.

·         Blog: It is very useful to write all the things you are doing in class, so parents can know all the activities their children are doing. If you achieve your blog to be interactive, it will be much more useful. With the blog you can work the writing and the comprehension.

·         Google Earth: There is not better way of teaching a language that contextualizes it on its culture. A travel around the UK can be an exceptional way of teaching English based on a project.

·         Issuu: This application helps you to have your own magazine. This is very important to improve your children’s writing.

·         E-twinning: This is a platform created by the European Commission that includes all the schools of the EU that wants to take part on. More over, you can work in a project with other schools using the English as the vehicular language.

In conclusion, the ICT offer a huge fan of possibilities to teach a new language in the 21^st century. To include them in the school is not easy, but we have to make the effort of trying it and the results will be very positive.